Social Fusion: Integrating Twitter and Instagram for Event Monitoring

This paper describes the implementation of a service to identify and geo-locate real world events that may be present as social activity signals in two different social networks. Specifically, we focus on content shared by users on Twitter and Instagram in order to design a system capable of fusing data across multiple networks. Past work has demonstrated that it is indeed possible to detect physical events using various social network platforms. However, many of these signals need corroboration in order to handle events that lack proper support within a single network. We leverage this insight to design an unsupervised approach that can correlate event signals across multiple social networks. Our algorithm can detect events and identify the location of the event occurrence. We evaluate our algorithm using both simulations and real world datasets collected using Twitter and Instagram. The results indicate that our algorithm significantly improves false positive elimination and attains high precision compared to baseline methods on real world datasets.